Chapter 5 #2
The guys led Aurora down a side street and up the porch steps to a quaint stone home that Aurora didn’t think she would have even noticed if she’d walked past. It was far smaller than most Nantucket houses, as though all the generational wealth that had rained down on this island had missed this poor woman.
The woman who opened the door was not the older woman in question. At sixty-something, this woman was much younger than their target. “She’s ready for you,” the woman said, before introducing herself as Mary. “I’m Marybelle’s daughter,” she said. “Stephen was my grandfather.”
Aurora took this to mean that the man who’d drowned in the shipwreck was Stephen.
“She can’t talk long,” Mary explained as she led them through the shadowy halls back to where her mother, Marybelle, apparently spent most of her numbered days. “She sleeps most of the day away, but her brain is as sharp as ever when she’s awake. Remember, she’s one hundred and four years old.”
Aurora took a staggered breath. One hundred and four?
She did a quick calculation and realized that Marybelle had been born in 1921 or 1922, depending on when her birthday fell.
Oren seemed jocular and slightly arrogant, as though Marybelle’s age meant nothing to him, but if Aurora could read Kenny at all, she guessed that he was similarly in awe.
In the living room, they found the tiniest older woman Aurora had ever seen.
She was bony, with glowing white hair that curled rather beautifully around her ears.
She wore all black, and her veined hands rested gently on her lap.
“Good afternoon, young directors,” she said, her voice light and airy.
Aurora felt a shiver down her back.
“Hi there,” Oren said. “I’m Oren. This is my artist partner, Kenny. And this here is Aurora. She’s from Rome.”
“Oh.” Marybelle turned her head slowly to look at Aurora. “You are quite striking, my dear.”
Aurora knew that her beauty was the least-interesting fact of herself, but she smiled anyway. “You are, too,” she said.
Marybelle laughed a twinkling laugh. But Aurora wanted to tell Marybelle it was true. Not only was the older woman striking, but she was gorgeous. Old age and beauty went together, Aurora felt.
Maybe because Marybelle knew she would be exhausted soon, she launched quickly into the story of her father’s shipwreck.
“I was six years old,” she said. “Nearly seven when it happened, which means I remember a great deal. The storms that night were outrageous. I thought our house was going to fall apart.” Marybelle gestured to indicate that this was the very house where she’d lived as a little girl of six, which felt even more insane than anything else.
Oren, Kenny, and Aurora looked down at her from the other side of the camera, and Kenny pointed at her. Aurora felt that Marybelle was being appropriately cinematic. She should have been a movie star.
She went on to describe her memories. How she had heard the splitting sound of wood, although it was improbable that Marybelle had heard the shipwreck from where she slept in her bed.
She described going out to the cove the following day and seeing the boat's tip above the water.
Her mother had wept for weeks on end. “I was so small, but I had to take care of myself and my siblings after that,” Marybelle said, her face growing shadowed.
“But losing men to the Nantucket Sound was not a rare occurrence. For hundreds of years, the ocean took and took and took our people. It was expected, even as it was heartbreaking.”
For a little less than an hour, they interviewed Marybelle.
Eventually, Oren ran out of questions, and Kenny and Aurora took over.
Aurora felt she couldn’t get enough of this woman’s stories.
She was a window into the past of this glorious island, an island Aurora had decided to make her home.
I can’t go back to Rome, she thought, as she, Kenny, and Oren packed up the camera and sound equipment, thanked Marybelle, and turned to go.
Once outside, they made their way to Oren’s truck, the same truck that had taken Gwen to the hospital to fix her broken arm.
They loaded everything up, then took off for the cove where the shipwreck had occurred in 1928.
As they went, Aurora couldn’t help but think of the hundreds of devastating events of the previous centuries on Nantucket.
One of those events, she knew, was the burning of the White Oak Lodge.
Without the burning of the Lodge, of course, Aurora herself never would have been born.
“That was killer, guys,” Oren said, smacking the steering wheel. “It felt great.”
Kenny was more effusive than he’d been before.
He smiled, quoted Marybelle, and suggested how the interview could be woven into a broader narrative about Nantucket and its history.
Oren and Kenny laughed together, and Aurora felt as though she were a part of a dynamic story, their story as they rose to the top of the filmmaking world.
Abstractly, she wondered how she would work into their story, then she told herself it didn’t matter.
She was with them as a friend. She was with them to kill time, to distract herself from everything that had been happening in her world, and to hide from her father, who, she was beginning to think, didn’t trust her at all.
At the cove where, nearly one hundred years ago, a ship sank, Oren, Kenny, and Aurora got out of the truck and headed for the sand.
Maybe because it was eighty-two degrees, but they were all wearing swimsuits beneath their clothes.
Without speaking, they stripped to their suits, then walked into the glistening waves.
Aurora felt the rush of chilly water up to her thighs, and then she felt a freedom she’d never known.
Oren swam out farther than Aurora and Kenny, his limbs wild, proof that he wasn’t a terribly strong swimmer. When he reached where they thought the ship probably was, he put on his goggles and dropped beneath the waves, hoping to spot something.
Aurora and Kenny were up to their necks, their feet still on the sand. They watched for Oren’s head, wondering what he saw down there.
Then Aurora felt fingers sliding through her fingers.
She sucked in her breath but didn’t dare look over.
She could feel Kenny’s body just a few inches from hers.
She could feel her desire for him churning in her chest. They stood like that, hands latched as the waves sloshed against them until, all at once, Oren splashed to the surface and cried out, “I think I can see something! You guys have to come check it out!”
Aurora’s and Kenny’s hands jerked apart.
Aurora took off, swimming faster than Kenny and reaching Oren first. She put on the goggles and dropped into the depths, where she swam down, down, down until she could make out the very tip-top of an old wooden ship.
Bubbles popped out from between her lips, and her heart pounded.
Down there, faced with all that history, all she could think about was Kenny up above, his legs swishing back and forth to keep him above the surface, to keep him breathing.